Easter Banquet featuring Venison in Elderberry and Hawthorn

To those of you who imagine that a forager’s fare is stark or unexciting, then think again. A fortuitous gift of venison (I love living in the country) turned Easter Sunday into a culinary delight! In this case, rustling up lunch at short notice, I also ‘foraged’ in the garden to combine it with plants found in the ditches and woodland.

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A Foragers Traditional Sunday Lunch Menu

Venison Medallions in Elderberry and Hawthorn Gin Sauce

Sorrel and Wild Garlic Mash

Steamed Ground Elder

Wild Spring Salad with Elderberry Vinegar

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Ingredients:
1 loin of Roe deer contributed by your neighbour’s brother now that the shooting season is open
A pan of potatoes dug up from last year’s potato patch that survived the blight
A handful of early tangy Sorrel leaves
A handful of Wild Garlic from any river bank
A pan full of Ground Elder (it shrinks when steamed)
1/4 litre of last year’s pasteurised Elderberry juice
A good glug of my Vintage Hawthorn Berry Gin

Spices:
Dried seaweed, salt and pepper, ground hogweed seed and possibly some other mysterious things foraged from the dark and wild recesses of the kitchen cupboard

For the salad:
Lambs lettuce, Chickweed, Dandelion leaf, Watercress (taken from the bank not the stream bed), Wild Garlic, Wild Mint, Hairy Bittercress

For the dressing:
Olive oil, Elderberry ‘balsamic’ vinegar

Directions:
Set your potatoes to boil when you start preparing the meat.

Slice the venison loin into 1 cm thick medallions and slowly pan-fry them in olive until just done. Venison is best cooked through and not left too pink or bloody. Toward the end of the cooking add the elderberry juice and a generous amount of the spice mix. When the venison are cooked remove them from the pan with a slotted spoon and keep them gently warm in the oven in a flat baking dish. (I have a neat Le Creuset one that I foraged from an abandoned caravan!) Reduce the elderberry juice by bubbling away until it thickens and just starts to caramelise, and then add a glug of hawthorn gin.

Drain and mash the potatoes being liberal with ground dried seaweed, salt and pepper, butter and milk until it reaches a smooth creamy consistency. Then add finely chopped sorrel leaves, chopped wild garlic and stir in until the mash is well flecked with green.

Lastly roughly chop and steam your ground elder just like spinach. Drain well, squeezing out the water, toss to loosen and season with butter and salt.

Toss your lightly shredded salad ingredients into a big bowl and sprinkle with equal amounts of olive oil and elderberry vinegar.

Make a ‘Easter egg nest’ of the mash and place a few medallions inside, pour over the sauce. Nestle the ground elder around the side and serve the salad in side bowls.

This was so delicious it elicited plenty of mm’s, aah’s and other good food noises and the diners forgot to suspiciously ask what was in it until they’d eaten it all! So enjoyed by Geza, Jim, Norrie and myself that no one took a photo. Sorry!!

Cost in a restaurant? £15 to £20 upwards. My shopping bill? £0 Actual cost? Probably no more than a pint of milk.

What’s up in the woodland garden

The last few days of glorious March sunshine have boosted the growth in the woodland garden. This is in a corner of the land always the last to be reached by the winter sunshine to warm the soil. It is thickly planted, mainly with alder whose love of water help to drain the boggy soil, with the help of a stand of willow and dogwood.

A small stream now winds through the trees, an ancient mill feed that I was allowed to divert to improve the biodiversity of the land. Along its banks the survivors of woodland plants I brought from Rumbling Bridge are starting to appear.

Wild garlic is establishing a nice little colony and meadowsweet, with it’s Savlon tasting leaves, is suddenly a few inches high. The marsh marigold and lesser celandines provide sudden splashes of yellow. The acorus is starting to poke its shoots above the water level to provide somewhere for the young tadpoles to cling too. I saw newts here last year.

On the western bank I also spot the skunk cabbage forming flower buds but there is no sign of the blue flag yet.

Under the trees, emerging from their protective moss, suddenly white windflowers (wood anemones) are nodding in the breeze. Unwittingly transplanted with them I notice, is dog mercury which later I’ll move to my planned poison garden!

Around the stream head there is also a plant I have failed to identify – it has attributes of both butterbur and hemp nettle – I’ll have to wait and see how it grows and flowers.

Willow buds and musings on animal medicine

All the willow that wasn’t coppiced back last month is now covered with pretty furry buds. Cut long stems and put them in a tall base for a dramatic Spring display that lasts a long time. Eventually your stems will sprout roots in the vase!

I peeled all the bark off the White Willow cuttings Salix alba, cut the strips into pieces and dried them. It will make an excellent pain relieving tea or an ointment. Willow naturally contains salicylic acid which is basically what aspirin is except that it doesn’t cause stomach upsets nor does it thin the blood in the same way.

At work we use willow bark in medicine for arthritis, backache and joint pain. Our Napiers Joint Ability Herbal Remedy contains 1000 mg of White Willow 1:1 fluid extract per 5 ml dose. (It also contains the vulnerary Yarrow, anti rheumatic and antispasmodic Black Cohosh and Blue Cohosh and a good amount of the liver herb, detoxifying Burdock root.)

Just today a man phoned me from Canada. He wanted to let me know how good he thought this remedy was. His sister-in-law had taken it after a knee operation. She also had digestive problems and wasn’t tolerating drugs very well so took Joint Ability instead. He said that not only did she have pain relief and a swift recovery, but her digestive troubles cleared up as well.

Her neighbour had a cat with an injured leg that the vet had scheduled for an amputation. She was very distressed and decided it might be worth giving the cat some of the medicine as a last resort, as it had helped the sister in-law recover so well from her operation. So she gave the cat some Joint Ability and it made a full recovery much to the amazement of the vet!

I’m not advocating that anyone use herbal medicines on their pets as it is illegal in the UK for herbalists to treat animals. But it was an interesting anecdote that livened up the day in the office.

Interestingly, animals also use plant medicines (zoopharmacognosy). Most pet owners will have seen their dog or cat eat grass if they have a stomach upset. Apes and monkeys use a wide range of plants for diarrhoea, worms and to modulate their fertility. Bears chew and spit out osha root to make an insect repellent paste that they smear on their fur.

Elephants are quite incredible. In East Africa, in the the final week of pregnancy, a female will make a special journey to seek out a tree that they never eat at any other time. She’ll strip the leaves and eat them all before going into labour later. This is the same plant that local African women also use to help contractions and have an easy birth!

Coltsfoot

Coltsfoot is one of the first spring flowers, after the snowdrops, with the flowers appearing first before the leaves. A wonderful herb for sore throats, it likes poor, dry, stony or gravelly ground, like the old cart track it follows at Gowanbank. Coltsfoot was the shop sign for herbalists in earlier centuries.

Coppicing willow and hazel

Willow coppices

Last weekend, mid February, I spent coppicing – cutting back my willow and hazel. I have a large amount of willow that I inherited in a rather poor condition. They were planted quite close to each other which is fine for coppicing but them not pruned back for some years. As a reasult they had grown spindly and weak, (crowding out good trees as well like oak, chestnut and maple,) and the high winter winds in January were the final nail in the coffin, causing a lot of them to keel over completely. You don’t have to be gentle when cutting back willow. Unlike some of the other trees where I feel quite guilty even trimming off the lower branches, willow grows like a weed. Even a small piece dropped onto the ground will be a sizeable shrub in a year’s time!

To plant a coppice all you need to do is to make cuttings from straight branches that you have cut before and push them into the ground in the early Spring around now. Cutting should be 18 to 30 cms long and 8 mm to 1 cm diameter. These are fine to get a good root structure going although I prefer the longer sections myself and have soft enough soil to push it three quarters of the way in. The part of the cutting that protrudes above the ground is called a stool. When it starts to grow it will put out rods all around the sides of the stool. By late Spring they will be in leaf. It really is that simple!

Pollarding, is when you have a willow tree and cut back the branches to around a foot long from the main trunk. The rods will then grow in the same way as they do from stools but much higher up.

Willow rods grown in a coppice from stools, will grow tall and straight and have an intense colour in the winter – perfect for basketry. Depending on the variety, willow will grow as much as 10 feet (3 metres) in a year. On a large scale you can crop your rods for baskets or fuel on a 2 to 5 year cycle – every 3 years being the most popular. This allows the rods time to grow. So if you have space you can grow 3 coppices in rotation, then you can cut willow every year. However, if you are not using a huge amount you can just selectively cut from one grove. The best time to coppice is February before the buds start to come out as the soft pussy willow buds appear in early March or late February in a warm year. At this time the plant is fairly dormant and will put all its energy into the new growth.

One useful tip is to lay down weed control fabric over the site of your coppice and push your planting stools through it. This saves a lot of time weeding and prevents other plants growing up and causing the willow to twist or fork. It also prevents quite a few nettle stings when you do come to harvest it! You should also plant them well away from drains (30 metres is good) as the fibrous roots travel! They will seek out and disrupt any underground drains as they like water.

Another good tip is to plant several different varieties. This have two main benefits. Firstly it provides excellent winter colour variation and choice of colour for weaving. Secondly, mixed variety coppices are healthier and more resistant to willow rust and willow beetle.

If you are planting in rows it is best to push the cuttings in 60 cm apart with two rows 75 cm apart. Then allow a 150 cm gap to walk down before planting the next two rows. (You can plant long rods horizontally under the soil, as willow will also sprou right along the length, but as it will not do this evenly cuttings are more accurate for a good looking coppice!)

The first year around 3 rods will probably grow and it is best to cut the willow back to 10 cm above the ground the following February as this will encourage more rods to grow so you have a nice thick base with 10 to 20 shoots from it.

Hazel coppices

Hazel will also grow in the same way and is particularly nice from making woodland coppices. Planted in random without weed control cloth, the ground around the cuttings can be planted with woodland plants. Wild Garlic Allium ursinum, Wild Primroses Primula vulgaris), Wood Anemone Anemone nemorosa, Wood Sorrel Oxalis acetosa, Lesser Celandine Ranunculus ficaria and Woodruff Galium odoratum among others. I have Lady’s Smock Cardamine pratensis growing under mine too whose leaves and flowers are a lovely addition to early Spring salads with their peppery, mustardy tang. Some people also like Bluebells although they are not a favourite of mine.

The advantage of hazel is also that if you allow it to grow into a tree, and control the height, you will also have hazel nuts in the winter. I got a great crop this year as I learned to pick them slightly green before the squirrels did and let them go brown sitting out on paper in a warm dry place.

This year in January, I planted some more hazel trees in my coppice from pollarded rods that were probably 3 or 4 years old rather than cuttings. This has given me ‘instant’ small trees about shoulder height and a month later they are already producing green catkins.

Other plants for coppicing

There are quite a few other plants you can coppice. I have Dogwood and Elder here at Wychmoss. You can also coppice poplar, beech, hornbeam and yew.

Willow rods for sale

Do get in touch if you would like to buy willow rod bundles for baskets, fencing or garden structures.

Oyster Mushrooms on the Menu

Both of the large Horse Chestnut trees that fell in the January gale were host to some fabulous oyster mushrooms. Fried in butter with an egg on the side. Mmm. One tree has not been cut up and gone forever, but one remains as a large stump on which I found these.

Wychmoss update – Signs of Spring?

It may be mid-winter here at Wychmoss. with cold, crisp frosty days the norm, but Coltsfoot buds are appearing in warmer, sheltered spots on the edge of my woodland to cheer the heart and soothe the throat! Coltfoot is one of my all-time favourite herbs for sore throats although my son tells me it makes a good tobacco replacement now he’s trying to give up… again!

My humble polythene and scrap wood greenhouse, although rather ravaged by the Scottish hurricane, is managing to keep above 0 degrees C most days and the Chamomile bed I propagated from the mother plant in November is settling in. I also have a propagation beds of Scullcap, Ashwaganda and Coltsfoot and seed flats of Echinacea, Meadowsweet and Evening Primrose.

Wood Anemone (Anemone nemorosa)

The Meadowsweet I will transplant into the woodland garden I am making along the stream. Last year, I planted it with Wild Garlic Allium ursinum, Skunk Cabbage Symplocarpus foetidus, Blue Flag Iris versicolor, Singer’s Root Acorus calamus, Marsh Marigold Caltha palustris, and also transplanted some Wood Anemone Anemone nemorosa and Lesser Celandine Ranunculus ficaria.

In the clearing below went Starflower Borago officinalis, Primrose Primula vulgaris and Cowslip Primula veris which I am hoping will reappear this Spring. In the lower stream, near the Witch Hazel Hamamelis virginia sapling, I planted a bed of Watercress Nasturtium officinale which is still perfectly edible despite the frosts and trying to get out of the stream with vigour and abundance!

I’ve noticed the buds of the Horse Chestnut Aesculus hippocastanum are already sticky – a promise of leaves to come – although, alas we lost two large Horse Chestnuts to the hurricane. During the last few years they have both yielded excellent crops of Oyster Mushrooms Pleurotus ostreatus so I guess their time had come.

The weekend’s project is to start planting a new traditional hedge from bare root stock. The plan is a mixture of Beech Fagus sylvatica, Hawthorn Crataegus monogyna, Guelder Rose (aka Cramp Bark) Viburnum opulus mixed through with Dog Rose Rosa canina, Honeysuckle Lonicera japonica and Woodbine Lonicera periclymenum.